Dustin
Ginsburg
The
othered community that I will likely write about for our upcoming project is
the Muslim community. I think that it will be very interesting to research and
discover the ways in which the Muslim faith has been affected by current world
events. Conflicts and wars in the Arab world, terrorist organizations such as
ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and terrorist attacks in America and Europe have created an
image around Islam depicting violence, ignorance, and hatred. As a result, the
Islamic religion has been marginalized as a whole in Western society, creating
a stereotypical and stigmatized view of their religion.
My
initial ideas for how I will go about research for this project is first to
provide introductory information that will provide context and bring the reader
up-to-date about issues that add to the marginalization of Islam. News reports,
interviews, and informational videos will all probably provide enough
information to get my initial point across. After that introduction, I will
likely find statistics supporting the view that the overwhelming majority of
Muslim’s have rational, peaceful ideas in regards to their own religion. After
that segway, I will provide texts by members of the Muslim faith in addition to
other supporting texts, that further detail how Islam has been marginalized,
how the community has been affected, and what has been done by the community to
distance themselves from ‘problem’ members of the community. I think that this
project has the potential to be an eye-opening study into how Muslims are
currently being perceived in Western society and how world events have shaped
that image. At the end of this project, the ways in which our cultural ideas of
“normal” are constructed and reinforced in regards to Islam will be discussed,
analyzed, and theorized.
Hi Dustin,
ReplyDeleteI think this sounds like a great idea for your project! You've clearly already done a lot of thinking about it and have a sense about why it matters to you. Remember, though, while you'll do some secondary research (for example all the statistics you mentioned) the bulk of your paper will focus on analyzing how Muslims are represented in "normal" texts. All of what you've laid out here might be a bit too much for the scope of this project, but your last line--"the ways in which our cultural ideas of “normal” are constructed and reinforced in regards to Islam will be discussed, analyzed, and theorized."--is exactly the idea for the project. This is exactly what you'll want to focus on for the bulk of the project.
One thing I was thinking, is it might be helpful for you to narrow the scope of what you look at a little bit, just because the possibilities of tax that you could look at about Muslims seem endless. So you might want to narrow your focus just to the way Muslims are represented in America, for example. Or maybe you want to look at the way a certain kind of text, like national newspaper articles or radio programs or something like that, represent this group. I think narrowing your focus a little will help you from getting too overwhelmed.